Weakness: A Literary and Philosophical History

Weakness: A Literary and Philosophical History PDF Author: Michael O'Sullivan
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441178791
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Examining the nature of weakness has inspired some of the most influential aesthetic and philosophical portraits of the human condition. By reading a selection of canonical literary and philosophical texts, Michael O'Sullivan charts a history of responses to the experience and exploration of weakness. Beginning with Plato and Aristotle, this first book-length study of the concept explores weakness as it is interpreted by Lao Tzu, Nietzsche, Derrida, the Romantics, Dickens and the Modernists. It examines what feminist writers Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray have made of the gendered biomythology constructed around the figure of the "weaker vessel" and it considers related notions such as im-potentiality, a "syntax of weakness" and human vulnerability in the work of Agamben, Beckett and Coetzee. Through analysis of these differing versions of weakness, O'Sullivan's study challenges the popular myth that aligns masculine identity with strength and force and presents a humane weakness as a guiding motif for debates in ethics.

Weakness: A Literary and Philosophical History

Weakness: A Literary and Philosophical History PDF Author: Michael O'Sullivan
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441178791
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book Here

Book Description
Examining the nature of weakness has inspired some of the most influential aesthetic and philosophical portraits of the human condition. By reading a selection of canonical literary and philosophical texts, Michael O'Sullivan charts a history of responses to the experience and exploration of weakness. Beginning with Plato and Aristotle, this first book-length study of the concept explores weakness as it is interpreted by Lao Tzu, Nietzsche, Derrida, the Romantics, Dickens and the Modernists. It examines what feminist writers Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray have made of the gendered biomythology constructed around the figure of the "weaker vessel" and it considers related notions such as im-potentiality, a "syntax of weakness" and human vulnerability in the work of Agamben, Beckett and Coetzee. Through analysis of these differing versions of weakness, O'Sullivan's study challenges the popular myth that aligns masculine identity with strength and force and presents a humane weakness as a guiding motif for debates in ethics.

Discourses of Weakness and Resource Regimes

Discourses of Weakness and Resource Regimes PDF Author: Iwo Amelung
Publisher: Campus Verlag
ISBN: 3593438941
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
In welchem Zusammenhang stehen Schwächediskurse und Ressourcenregime? Warum eröffnet gerade dieses Begriffspaar eine Perspektive auf die Handlungsfähigkeit von Akteuren sowie auf historische Veränderungsprozesse? Dieser Band widmet sich programmatisch der Frage, welchen Einfluss Schwäche- und Stärkediskurse auf den Umgang mit Ressourcen haben und wie davon ausgehend Selbstbeschreibungen Eingang in Ressourcenprozesse finden und diese prägen.

Evil: A History in Modern French Literature and Thought

Evil: A History in Modern French Literature and Thought PDF Author: Damian Catani
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441184902
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 461

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Book Description
In this original, interdisciplinary approach to evil in French literature, Damian Catani links literary depictions of evil with cultural events to chart a history of the concept in some of the most important texts in modern literature. Beginning with Balzac and Baudelaire, Catani covers the restoration and the Second Empire before interpreting how Catholic stereotypes of the 'evil feminine' and new scientific theories impacted the work of Lautréamont and Zola. Moving into the twentieth century, evil is then explored in terms of the Self, power, knowledge and politics through readings of Proust, Céline, Sartre and Foucault. By seamlessly bringing together aesthetic, philosophical, historical and ideological concerns to read key French writers from the 18th to the 21st century, this study argues why a broader treatment of literary evils is vital to understanding our contemporary moral and political climate.

The Strong and the Weak in Japanese Literature

The Strong and the Weak in Japanese Literature PDF Author: Fuminobu Murakami
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136970517
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
This book uses texts from classical to modern Japanese literature to examine concepts of 'respect for the strong', as a notion of an evolutionary society, and 'sympathy for the weak', as a notion of a non-violent and changeless egalitarian society. The term strong refers not just to those with strength and power. It also includes other ideal attributes such as beauty, youth and goodness. Similarly, the term weak implies not only the weak and infirm, but also the disadvantaged, the indecent, the unsophisticated and those generally shunned by society. The former are associated not only with the power of life, competition, evolution, progress, development, ability, effectiveness, efficiency, individuality, the future, hope and romance, but also with violence, fighting, bullying, discrimination and sacrifice. The latter, in contrast, invoke notions of peace, egalitarianism, anti-discrimination and welfare, as well as stagnation, retreat, retrogression, degeneration and the decline of vital powers. By using these two concepts Murakami skillfully weaves a narrative that is part literary criticism, part social commentary. As such the book will be of huge interest to not only scholars and students of Japanese literature, but also those of Japanese society and culture.

Strong Voices, Weak History

Strong Voices, Weak History PDF Author: Pamela Joseph Benson
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472068814
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
From a March 2000 conference at the University of Pennsylvania, 16 essays explore such aspects as women's dialogue writing in 16th-century France, Maria Domitilla Galluzzi and the Rule of St. Clare of Assisi, courtly origins of new literary canons, the earliest anthology of English women's texts, and the reinvention of Anne Askew. One of the contri

Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body

Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body PDF Author: Lyle Jeremy Rubin
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 164503707X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
An honest reckoning with the war on terror, masculinity, and the violence of American hegemony abroad, at home, and on the psyche, from a veteran whose convictions came undone When Lyle Jeremy Rubin first arrived at Marine Officer Candidates School, he was convinced that the “war on terror” was necessary to national security. He also subscribed to a strict code of manhood that military service conjured and perpetuated. Then he began to train and his worldview shattered. Honorably discharged five years later, Rubin returned to the United States with none of his beliefs, about himself or his country, intact. In Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body, Rubin narrates his own undoing, the profound disillusionment that took hold of him on bases in the U.S. and Afghanistan. He both examines his own failings as a participant in a prescribed masculinity and the failings of American empire, examining the racialized and class hierarchies and culture of conquest that constitute the machinery of U.S. imperialism. The result is a searing analysis and the story of one man’s personal and political conversion, told in beautiful prose by an essayist, historian, and veteran transformed.

Weak Knowledge

Weak Knowledge PDF Author: Moritz Epple
Publisher: Campus Verlag
ISBN: 3593440296
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 503

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Book Description
Im Gegensatz zu landläufigen Vorstellungen sind wissenschaftliche Wissensbestände häufig prekäre Ressourcen. Sie können in bestimmten Situationen aus epistemischen Gründen schwach sein, weil Begründungen oder empirische Evidenz problematisch sind. In anderen Situationen fehlt die kulturelle und soziale Anerkennung oder das fragliche Wissen bleibt schwach, weil es nicht gelingt, es praktisch nutzbar zu machen. Der Band versammelt Beiträge aus allen historischen Epochen und aus einem breiten Spektrum von Wissensgebieten - von der Medizin bis zur Klimatologie.

Weak Barbarism

Weak Barbarism PDF Author: Radu Vasile Chialda
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1504987934
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Barbarism: Contemporaneous Axiological Mutations is not meant as a thesis that provides a holistic approach on the concept of barbarism, a concept whose area of investigation may be deemed as vast as that of the concept of culture. By taking advantage of a hindsight outlook as to what concerns this topic, one could learn a great deal of details about the radical alteration of the current depiction of the notion of barbarism. Therefore, as an incipient undertaking into the overall argumentative process, which defines the character of the thesis, I shall try to illustrate the idea of an induced misunderstanding, at a global level, on the concept of barbarism, which has led to significant and acute hermeneutical malformations concerning its various aspects of manifestation, both socially and culturally and, consequently, in terms of barbarisms own axiological structure in the range of human behavior.

Life Is Elsewhere

Life Is Elsewhere PDF Author: Anne Lounsbery
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501747932
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 489

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Book Description
In Life Is Elsewhere, Anne Lounsbery shows how nineteenth-century Russian literature created an imaginary place called "the provinces"—a place at once homogeneous, static, anonymous, and symbolically opposed to Petersburg and Moscow. Lounsbery looks at a wide range of texts, both canonical and lesser-known, in order to explain why the trope has exercised such enduring power, and what role it plays in the larger symbolic geography that structures Russian literature's representation of the nation's space. Using a comparative approach, she brings to light fundamental questions that have long gone unasked: how to understand, for instance, the weakness of literary regionalism in a country as large as Russia? Why the insistence, from Herzen through Chekhov and beyond, that all Russian towns look the same? In a literary tradition that constantly compared itself to a western European standard, Lounsbery argues, the problem of provinciality always implied difficult questions about the symbolic geography of the nation as a whole. This constant awareness of a far-off European model helps explain why the provinces, in all their supposed drabness and predictability, are a topic of such fascination for Russian writers—why these anonymous places are in effect so important and meaningful, notwithstanding the culture's nearly unremitting emphasis on their nullity and meaninglessness.

Power of the Weak

Power of the Weak PDF Author: Jennifer Carpenter
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252065040
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Covering the eleventh through sixteenth centuries, these essays suggest that influence and power may have paradoxically been available to women despite, and sometimes precisely because of, their subordinate position in society. Striking for its range of scholarship, this collection explores the power and independence, relationships and influence of medieval queens, holy women, mothers, widows, Jewish conversas, and others. Latin and Anglo-Norman hagiography, confessors' manuals, coronation rituals, responsa literature, and legal theory are represented. "An intriguing exploration of a basic paradox of medieval society, and an excellent blend of theory and gender studies with detailed work relevant for social and political history." -- Joel Rosenthal, author of Patriarchy and Families of Privilege in Fifteenth-Century England JENNIFER CARPENTER is a lecturer in history at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand.